Playstation 4 to get PowerVR 6 GPU

[Monkeywoman]

The happiness that we have PS3-ers, however, is that we have the Cell processor, this incredible beast like cpu power on normally takes for the GPU (video card) had been. Now give FNGonline is rather that SCEI has officially chosen the PowerVR Series 6 by Imagination Technologies to produce the next console in 2012. (Where a film now in the bios running, the world will end, fine!) The IMGTec's PowerVR Technology will use a technology called TBDR and 3 to 5 times better than a competitive level nVidia / ATI graphics card. TBDR was the basis of the Sega Dreamcast and the console for that reason that the time had incredible grafics.

"The PlayStation 4 shall use a high end variant of the 6 Series line. Performance, specifications and features are unknown at this time. The Series 6 shall receive an official announcement from IMGTEC sometime in 2010, with initial models targeting the smartphone and netbook sectors.

IMGTEC's PowerVR technology uses an advance technique called TBDR which can outperform a competing product IMR from nVidia / ATi by 3.5 fold whilst maintaining equal that size and price point. TBDR was the primary reason the SEGA Dreamcast was capable of such astonishing graphical feats as early as 1998.

And with the recent news about Cell, looks like we'll see PowerVR 6 and IBM Power 7

source: http://translate.google.co.uk/transl...hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[Vit^pr0n]

As long as Sony learns from the horrible mistakes they made with the launch of the PS3. They need to make sure not to repeat that so they can be back on top like in the PS2 days.

[SimBy]

The IMGTec's PowerVR Technology will use a technology called TBDR and 3 to 5 times better than a competitive level nVidia / ATI graphics card.

Riiight.

[fellix_bg]

Too much have been invested in R&D around Cell for PS3 to be ditched at once. And it's not the sole reason for the current generation shortfalls, but the wimpy graphics part. Some game developers are actually being "forced" to invent workarounds, supplementing the inadequate GPU with the Cell's SPU performance for graphically intensive tasks. OpenCL is already available for Cell, so this will be helpful for easy implementation of multi-platform solutions and algorithms. What PS4 really needs to get is a decent GFX part, then Cell would be just a small bump on the road.

[kuhla]

So the next playstation will continue to be as difficult to develop for as the current one since Sony refuses to adopt a setup more comparable to a PC? I say this in reference to all the articles/interviews I've read that have highlighted how easy it is for a developer to work with the Xbox360 considering all the shared standards (with the PC).

[Stukov]

Well Sony's PS developers are of the opinion they can make everything better and from the ground up. I mean look at all the random (and failed) standards Sony has made, they have never ever really adopted the easier standardized path.

From my understanding this comes from the Japanese culture, Sony will always go down the same path, even if there is a path of lesser resistance so they feel they did on their own. They think they can lead in everything, unfortunately they are so hit and miss. Blu-ray, PS, PS2 have only ever been their winning platforms.

[zalbard]

Hope it will be easier to code for.
But somehow it doesn't look so yet.

[003]

The Series 6 shall receive an official announcement from IMGTEC sometime in 2010, with initial models targeting the smartphone and netbook sectors.

Ah, ok. I'm sure it will deliver excellent graphics performance on the PS4, in fact 3-5x more powerful than ATI and Nvidia solutions.

[Greg83]

Well with the time its coming out.
It only has to look well on paper.

World may not come to an end 2012, but your career probably will.

[Stukov]

Well with the time its coming out.
It only has to look well on paper.

World may not come to an end 2012, but your career probably will.

The great shaking is not set in stone (yes there is a pun there), but will likely happen. The world will not "end", but yes, some people will die. But this isn't really a change from what goes on now. The cycle will continue....but back on topic.

PS3 was rather paper tiger. Though the GFX was little underpowered, to me the biggest mistake was the lack of ram. If there is one thing any console shouldn't skimp on is RAM.

[Manicdan]

id rather consoles be rebuilt every 3-4 years and not cost so much. they only look good for those first few years anyway. and SLI/Xfire really hurt the current gens since a PC can be so much stronger than a console even on their release.

for the average person, the consoles are for family and friends and should be affordable and available, the PC should be the powerhouse.

[eric66]

3 or 5 time better !!! wow where has this company been when intel needed em most

[Vit^pr0n]

id rather consoles be rebuilt every 3-4 years and not cost so much. they only look good for those first few years anyway. and SLI/Xfire really hurt the current gens since a PC can be so much stronger than a console even on their release.

for the average person, the consoles are for family and friends and should be affordable and available, the PC should be the powerhouse.

I honestly would just prefer if developers made games for the PC first then ported them to consoles. That way they can make use of the current and future hardware, while also downscaling it for the weak consoles. It's a win-win for everyone

[Manicdan]

I honestly would just prefer if developers made games for the PC first then ported them to consoles. That way they can make use of the current and future hardware, while also downscaling it for the weak consoles. It's a win-win for everyone

software companies probably wouldnt make enough money from the PC version with all the nice graphics to cover the extra cost to make those graphics.

[nn_step]

ummm

tile-based deferred rendering (often abbreviated as TBDR). As the polygon generating program feeds triangles to the PowerVR driver which stores them in memory in triangle strip format. Unlike other architectures, polygon rendering is not performed until all polygon information has been collated for the current frame—hence rendering is deferred.

In order to render, the display is split into rectangular sections in a grid pattern. Each section is known as a tile. With each tile is associated a list of the triangles that visibly overlap that tile. Each tile is rendered in turn to produce the final image.

Tiles are rendered using a process similar to ray-casting. Rays are cast onto the triangles associated with the tile and a pixel is rendered from the triangle closest to the camera. The PowerVR hardware typically calculates the depths associated with each polygon for one tile row in 1 cycle.

The advantage of this method is that, unlike with a more traditional z-buffered rendering pipeline, work is never done determining what a polygon looks like in an area where it is obscured by other geometry. It also allows for correct rendering of partially transparent polygons independent of the order in which they are processed by the polygon producing application. (This capability was only implemented in Series 1 and 2. It has been removed since for lack of API support and cost reasons.) More importantly, as the rendering is circumscribed to a tile at a time, the whole tile can be in fast onchip memory, which is flushed to video memory before passing on to render the next tile. Under normal circumstances, each tile is visited just once per frame.

PowerVR is not the only pioneer of tile based deferred rendering, but the only one to successfully bring a TBDR solution to market. Microsoft also conceptualised the idea with their abandoned Talisman project. Gigapixel, a company that developed IP for tile-based deferred 3D graphics, were bought by 3dfx, who were subsequently bought by Nvidia. Nvidia has no official plans to pursue tile-based rendering at present.

Intel uses a similar concept in their integrated graphics solutions. However, their method, coined zone rendering, does not perform full hidden surface removal (HSR) and deferred texturing, therefore wasting fillrate and texture bandwidth on pixels that are not visible in the final image.

Recent advances in hierarchical Z-buffering have effectively incorporated ideas previously only used in deferred rendering, including the idea of being able to split a scene into tiles and of potentially being able to accept or reject tile sized pieces of polygon.

So it couldn't possibly be TBDR for why they are selecting said graphics chip....

[Blacky]

The IMGTec's PowerVR Technology will use a technology called TBDR and 3 to 5 times better than a competitive level nVidia / ATI graphics card.

Riiight.

Same thought here lol Sony lately is tryng to launch things "10 years ahead" and fails like PSP Go...

[Vit^pr0n]

software companies probably wouldnt make enough money from the PC version with all the nice graphics to cover the extra cost to make those graphics.

Only way I'd see it increasing costs is if they take too long making the game because of it. Though honestly, I'd rather they release the downscaled console version first if it means getting the PC version working perfectly. That way we don't get silly console ports.

[Chaserjzx100]

from http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=11554

The tile-based deferred rendering of PowerVR's architectures is pretty simple: Wait until the software sends all of the commands to draw one frame, while storing every command that comes in. Sort these commands by tile, then render one tile at a time.

By rendering one tile at a time, while at the same time having all information about all commands that are going to be executed at that tile, the hardware is able to completely sort all polygons before rendering, which results in only rendering visible pixels, allowing for maximal efficiency in rendering.

There is also a memory bandwidth benefit, as the entire tile is written to the framebuffer once, and no external z-buffer is needed.

The problem with this deferred rendering approach is the fact that the entire scene must be cached before rendering. This "scene buffer" effectively takes the place of the z-buffer. The objection I have to this approach is that the size of the scene buffer is unknown before rendering, and so there are always going to be possible buffer overflow issues which could drastically impact performance. By contrast, the z-buffer's size is well-known prior to rendering. Immediate-mode renderers (pretty much any GPU available today) also have a number of techniques that improve efficiency, so I don't see a reason to go "all the way" to deferred rendering to solve problems that, in my mind, don't really need solving given today's rendering performance.

hmmm so is this good or bad?

[annihilat0r]

5 times faster than current ATI/NVidia in 2012 is probably going to be the same as a high-end ATI/NVidia card in 2012. And it's gonna be half as fast as what'll be on the market in 2013.

Of course, if we all don't die by then

[hyc]

3 or 5 time better !!! wow where has this company been when intel needed em most

Sorry if I missed the joke, but Intel's Poulsbo is a PowerVR 5 GPU... (PowerVR 5 is also in TI's OMAP3 series.)


I used to be a big Sony fan, I've got $$thousands in Trinitron XBR TVs and Minidisc gear still. They do come up with good technology from time to time, but yeah, they've never learned the lesson about licensing it openly to get good market adoption.

As for designing a console that's very different from a PC - more power to them. PCs suck for realtime audio/video. The hardware is inherently lame, the x86 system architecture (CPU, NB, SB, etc.) is inherently lame, etc. etc... If your mission is to design a super-high-performance graphics machine, you need to stay away from PC architectures anyway.

[informal]

The IMGTec's PowerVR Technology will use a technology called TBDR and 3 to 5 times better than a competitive level nVidia / ATI graphics card.

Riiight.

The only way the above can be true is that they made a mistake in the article and forgot to add a little bit at the end.So it should go like this:
The IMGTec's PowerVR Technology will use a technology called TBDR and 3 to 5 times better than a competitive level nVidia / ATI graphics card from 2003.

[Lightman]

This is old news for me at least (I've read it a month ago).

But guys don't get exited about 3-5 times better figure! It's pure marketing ...
TBDR hardware is 3-5 times more efficient (power/die area) than standard rasterization hardware. Rasterization hardware is just a part of modern GPU which also has shader ALUS command processors and plenty of other stuff. So taking into account everything GPU needs nowdays TBDR advantage will be much smaller in die/power.
One thing it excels at is memory bandwidth required by TBDR to render a frame, which is significantly less than what today's ATi and nVidia solutions require.


Anyway it should be exiting in console world just before world ends

[zanzabar]

this was announced or proposed before the 58xx launch and getting a chip 3-4x faster than a 4870x2 in flops is stupid, as of now ati has a solution thats over 2x so having a design by late 2010 isnt anything amazing especially since folps is meaningless.

im just glad that its not a 3 year old NV part when its launched like the last one was on the ps3 its vary limited ATM by that rsx POS chip, but with the xbpx is moving to that new cell hybrid from ibm and keeping ati for what is supposed to be the 8xx chips i dont see sony coming ahead of this one in tech or drawing in devs, but sonys 1st party ips are way better IMO

i guess that it will be interesting with the next gen

[KoHaN69]

Historically, PowerVR outperformed ATI and NVIDIA in the Nintendo64 then the dreamcast compared to PCs at that time. But also, historically, true full-polygon directX 3D existed for less than 3 years (Riva TNT / Rage 128 came out in 1998)

They even challenged nvidia's GeForce2 quite nicely with the 3 series card: KYRO but since it lacked T&L they dropped out of the mainstream PC hardware market, like many many others.
Now PC hardware (ATI, NVIDIA) is a decade ahead of PowerVR in high resolution 3D acceleration, but PowerVR focused and remained strong in the field of mobile device (even the behated/loved iPhone has a PowerVR chip)

I personally miss the late 90s in PC hardware. There was a true sense of competition on every front and many innovations like DirectX and Glide/openGL, and still dozens of '3D accelerator' hardware companies.
Not Just 2.

Before this rumor here, it was speculated that the PSP2 will likely use a PowerVR SGX55x chip based on their new 6 series
which remarkably supports OpenGL 2.0 and up to DirectX 10.1 with Shader Model 4.1
-such power on a mobile gaming system? Now that's impressive. Maybe Sony hopes that adapting the same architecture to their main console will help developers to port games to the PSP2.

[madcho]

Sony
is
Funny